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Lex Fridman Podcast · 2 min instead of 2 h 34 m · Mar 1, 2026
Fighting YouTube copyright claims on fair use paid off
Rick Beato
Founder, Beato Club
Music educator, producer and songwriter whose YouTube channel on great musicians and music theory reaches millions of viewers.
Lex FridmanHost · Host, Lex Fridman Podcast
Robotics and AI researcher at MIT; started the show in 2018.
About this segment
Beato says labels began demonetizing videos after the Dreams skateboard viral moment. He hired a lawyer, who has fought 4,000 Content ID claims and won every one.
From “Rick Beato: Greatest Guitarists of All Time, History & Future of Music | Lex Fridman Podcast #492”, Mar 1, 2026. Watch the full episode
Takeaways
- Labels claim all revenue even for 20 seconds of a clip
- A lawyer has fought 4,000 claims and won all
- Most YouTubers never fight claims for fear of losing channels
In this episode
Full episode- 1:46:13Why AI songs get spotted, and who benefits from AI4:37
2:04:39Fighting YouTube copyright claims on fair use paid off2:14
- 1:10:30Why the Beatles' best work came once they stopped touring2:44Up next
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 2:04:46
there there was a guy on the skateboard on tiktok that had the ocean spray thing and and he was listening to dreams by fleetwood mac yeah and that blew up and became a number one song again and the labels then realized i mean i had made many videos about about why this is wrong and it should be fair use and everything well because of that the labor's like oh maybe we should rethink this and then they just started demonetizing videos demonetize means they get all the money they get all the money in a one hour video if they if you use 20 seconds of a clip they get all the money okay so i hired a lawyer finally after the rick rubin video because i thought it was ridiculous i go over to to to tuscany i interview rick at his house and and uh i had hired a lawyer to fight this who i'm going to have on my channel i don't
- 2:05:44
want to say who it is but he's another youtuber and uh he had approached me a couple years ago and and it's not cheap to do uh you're gonna do like a public interview with him i'm gonna do an interview with him yes i talked to him today about it i can't wait yeah that'd be great so he said you should fight these because every single one of them is fair use and he went through my my um entire cattle i have 2100 videos and he's fought 4 000 content id claims and won every single one of them 4 000 that's a lot i mean when i do top 20 guitar solos there's 20 content id claims you know it's and it's either it can be either from the sound recording if i use that Or if I just play it, it can be from the publisher.
- 2:06:35
That's amazing. Yeah. So is there, I mean, that's, it's still, he's still a lawyer, still work. Does that, is there a hopeful thing you can say about the future of.